Son of Jailed Moldovan Pol Pays Dear for Posh Lifestyle

UK authorities seize almost half a million pounds believed to be derived from ex-Moldovan PM’s corrupt activities.

8 February 2019

The son of Moldova’s imprisoned ex-premier Vlad Filat has been ordered to forfeit more than $600,000 (around 466,000 pounds) to UK authorities, money they say is linked to his father’s corrupt activities.

The UK National Crime Agency announced the measures yesterday against 22-year-old Vlad Luca Filat, a student in London who paid 390,000 pounds upfront to rent a flat in the upmarket Knightsbridge neighborhood and splashed out 200,000 pounds on a Bentley.

The City of London Magistrates Court on Tuesday granted forfeiture orders on three frozen bank accounts owned by Luca Filat.

“I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the cash was derived from his father’s criminal conduct in Moldova,” District Judge Michael Snow said.

The elder Filat was sentenced to serve nine years in prison in 2016 for his role in the still unsolved disappearance of around $1 billion from three Moldovan banks in 2014.

Luca Filat. Image via Anton Pavlovich/Youtube.

Luca Filat was "unable to demonstrate a legitimate source for the money" in his frozen accounts, which were “mainly funded by deposits from overseas companies in Turkey and the Cayman Islands,” the National Crime Authority said.

Moldovan opposition leader Maia Sandu recently asked Romania to help investigate the billion-dollar bank fraud. The authorities in Chisinau have failed to recover any of the money in the four years since the fraud was revealed, she said, according to Balkan Insight.

The accused mastermind of the fraud, businessman-politician Ilan Shor, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in 2017 but remains under house arrest. He recently obtained documents allowing him to run for parliament.

UK authorities were granted new powers to seize suspicious funds in 2017. The Financial Times says they were first used late last year to seize jewelry bought by Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of a man imprisoned in Azerbaijan for defrauding a large bank.